In today's educational climate, an increasing number of persons seek knowledge and further education regarding a truly diverse and wide variety of subjects. As can be appreciated, education and training takes a wide variety of forms. Education starts at a very young age and extends through high school. Thereafter, persons may attend any of a variety of universities, colleges or technical centers. However, education and training is not limited to these formal environments. Illustratively, many companies, agencies and other entities implement training programs to train people with the skills those people need for their respective jobs. Additionally, after receiving a college education, many persons, in an increasingly greater rate, attend some type of graduate school. Graduate schools may include medical school, law school and business school, as well as a wide variety of other advanced curriculums. Even after such higher educations, for example, persons still attend conferences, seminars and other organized meetings to exchange information and ideas.
Accordingly, education and training are present in our lives from a very young age and might never end for some persons. As described above, this education takes a wide variety of forms. However, one common thread running through this education is the necessity to convey information from persons and materials that possess the knowledge, to persons wanting the knowledge. The persons providing the knowledge will hereinafter be referred to as “teachers,” with those persons receiving the knowledge referred to as “students.”
The training environment of a medical student provides insight into the presently used teaching methods. Typically, a medical student starts his or her education with the hope of being enriched by the knowledge he or she seeks. Typically, a medical student may walk into a classroom and, from day one, the lights go out and the slides start flashing on the screen. The rate at which the slides are shown may average as much as 180 slides per hour. Nevertheless, the slides pass by in front of the medical student and she is expected to digest this information.
The information used in teaching may come from numerous sources. For example, the slides shown to the medical students may be the result of years of collecting by a professor. Further, the slides may be one of a kind that the professor obtained from the professor's mentor, who used to be chairman of their department before he retired.
The students correctly perceive those slides as being of tremendous value. However, the students see the slides one time, and only one time, and then the slides are gone forever. After class, then, the students attempt to conjure up the slides either working alone or in groups. The students often unsuccessfully attempt to draw the slides when they are displayed in class. But before the essence of the slide is really captured, the next slide is being displayed. Then, after class the students might approach the professor and humbly request a copy of the slides. However, the slides often represent the career of the professor. As a result, the professor is hesitant to assist in a reproduction of his documents in any form.
The above scenario illustrates one of a variety of situations that prevent the exchange of information and knowledge from a teacher to a student. Accordingly, the scenario results in the students recreating the knowledge to which they were exposed. This recreation might be in the form of notes or crude reproductions of the slides, or whatever other information was presented in class that day. Accordingly, there is a need to provide a method to exchange knowledge from a teacher to a student that is both beneficial and acceptable to all parties.
Alternatively, a situation may be present when the teacher does indeed prepare and provide materials to the students. However, even in this situation there are common problems. For example, a teacher may copy a favorite diagram from a resource book and paste that diagram into their own created materials. The teacher may then surround this copied diagram with the teacher's own text. This, for one, results in potential copyright infringement violations. Also, with the advent of desktop publishing capabilities, the accumulation of these materials is becoming progressively easier. The student accurately perceives this material as coming straight from the professor and, as a result, considers the material of great value. In addition, the university, for example, may require the student to purchase the professor's material. Alternatively, the university will recommend that the student buy a series of materials from a particular publisher.
Accordingly, a situation has developed in the academic world, and in other learning environments, in which administrative persons, faculty members and students are discouraged and concerned with regard to the decreasing quality of their study materials. People are discouraged both from the perspective of a teacher, providing the materials, and from the perspective of a student, receiving the materials. For students, the situation is particularly discouraging in that their command of the material, in testing situations as well as other situations, will dictate the success of their careers.
To address the aforementioned issues, systems have been developed to effectively collect information from a wide variety of sources and provide one or more items of material from this collection to students in an efficient manner. In accordance with one such system, an entire educational curriculum for an organization can be made available to a user in a readily accessible collection. That is, a collection can be characterized as global to a particular organization, such as a college or corporation, including all curriculum materials that the particular organization utilizes. The system can then provide for navigation of information in the collection to thereby permit a user to interact with one or more items of material in the collection as if those item(s) were single textbook(s), journal(s), video(s) or treatise(s), for example.
In such systems, as well as systems where a user generally has access to a number of different materials in a collection, there are some challenges with the organization of such materials. In this regard, different users may desire a different taxonomy with respect to organization of materials within a collection of materials. More particularly, different users may desire to systematically arrange the materials of a collection in groups or categories according to different criteria. For example, users may desire to have the materials of the user's collection organized in accordance with well know taxonomies such as the Dewey Decimal Classification and/or the Library of Congress Classification. Also, for example, users may desire to have the materials organized in accordance with taxonomies based upon the subject matter and/or genre of the materials. In yet another example, users may desire to have the materials organized in accordance with one or more taxonomies more specific to the user, such as a taxonomy specific to the user's college (e.g., New York University course catalog) and/or a taxonomy specific to another organization to which the user belongs (e.g., American Bar Association).
Although systems have been developed that provide a collection of materials, such conventional systems typically organize all of the materials in accordance with a single given taxonomy, irrespective of the users receiving the collection. To organize the materials in accordance with a different desired taxonomy, users are typically required to manually organize such materials. Then, as the user's collection increases to include additional materials, the user is again required to manually place the additional materials within the user's desired taxonomy. Thus, it would be desirable to design a system and method of automatically placing materials of a collection into different taxonomies for different users without requiring the users or the source of the collection to manually organize the materials, and manually place additional materials within a manually organized collection.